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by RussianCow 2251 days ago
> Is this really so hard?

Absolutely, especially when there is no tangible benefit to doing so. At $day_job it took us over a month to convert our codebase to Python 3 (bit by bit, not all at once), and we still ended up running into errors in production. In our case, we were forced to make the switch because we needed to upgrade some libraries that had dropped Python 2 support, but there is plenty of software out there that Just Works™ and nobody wants to touch it (for good reason!). In those cases, it's way less expensive to pay someone to maintain the interpreter than it is to take on the effort of a full blown conversion.
1 comments
solarkraft 2251 days ago
How did you do it bit by bit? Running multiple interpreters (I'd imagine that to be another major effort - then again possibly well worth it if you're moving to a services architecture anyway)?
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RussianCow 2251 days ago
Kind of, but probably not in the way you're thinking. All I meant is that we transitioned each of our services from Python 2 to code that was compatible with both Python versions, one by one. We tackled one aspect of Python 3 support at a time, e.g. imports, strings, integer division, third-party libraries, etc. Between future imports and utility librariess like six, most things were fairly easy to make compatible across both versions.

Once we did as much as we could do on Python 2, we had one of our engineers maintain a separate Python 3 branch in a staging environment for a while (maybe two weeks?) that we did some heavy QA on. And once we were fairly confident in the results, we merged and released that over a weekend and fixed issues as they came up.

We did all of this once for each service, but the bulk of the work (>80%) was our legacy monolith. I think the whole thing would have taken way less time with better test coverage, but alas. :)

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takeda 2250 days ago
There's a way, but I did not do it outside of just POC. It's actually possible to compile legacy code using Cython and import it to python 3, then I suppose you could convert one file at a time.

It's possible that this might be more work that if you would use pylint, mypy, python-future. Also it probably won't work if your code tries to be clever and does some import hacking (although who knows, maybe it still would work)

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